There is no such thing as MinGW 5.3.0.2; do you, perhaps mean MinGW's
gcc-5.3.0-2?

> and I am trying to compile a simple hello world program to test
> it. It fails with the error mentioned I the subject heading of
> this email. It cannot find crt2.o. I also had trouble compiling
> another program and it said it couldnt find wchar.h. Am I missing
> some necessary packages or have I done something else wrong?
> Please advise.

To get even to that error message, you've presumably also installed
binutils, but it looks like you are missing the runtime library
packages, mingwrt-3.22.1 and w32api-3.18.1, and maybe a bunch of other
necessary support packages. Unless you really know what you are
doing, I suggest you use mingw-get, (via mingw-get-setup.exe if you
haven't already installed it), to install a minimal gcc-4.9.3 system,
then unpack the gcc-5.3.0 packages over the top.